This week the tribute to Herman Hesse goes on. This post is a summary of a book published at http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1166&context=etd. The second is a summary of an article published at http://tomconoboy.blogspot.com.br/2011/04/glass-bead-game-by-hermann-hesse.html
As Hesse's writing changes over the years, the theme of walking and wandering takes on an increasingly metaphorical role. In the early novels, walking is directly representative of the rebellion. In Glass Bead Game, the role walking plays is removed from his original method of using wandering to signify a reclamation of freedom. Yet, a reclamation of freedom is exactly what Josef Knecht achieves when he leaves the community of glass bead game in order to become a private tutor. Walking in this novel represent not his escape from a stifling intellectual environment, but rather an intellectual environment in which theory sees itself as superior to practice and where academic freedom is seemingly unending. Knecht, the protagonist, having spent his personal life in the perfection of a theoretical game, though, thirsts for experience in and of the real world. Knecht's wandering brings him to places where he can absorb knowledge that is unavailable in the pedagogical province's scholarly archives. A certain striving for individuality and feeling of urgency to develop and discern feelings for oneself seem to be the predominant way that readers identified with the author. The emphasis Hesse gave to inwardness and inmate personality gave support to the hippies and youth in their questioning of conventions and their rejection of the personas being imposed on them by authorities. Berman's definition works best for interpreting Hesse as a Modernist author, whose protagonists all rebel against the status quo in their lives. They insist on a life that serves the individual in its quest to break out of what Max Weber calls the "iron cage" into which modernity has confined such lives. Hesse's last two major novels, The Journey to the East(1932) and The Glass Bead Game(1943), taken together as halves of a whole, these books articulate Hesse's fear of extremes, both in politics and aesthetics. Written in the midst of uncertainty and fear of what the future might bring, these works assume that the political and cultural extremes of the twentieth century have been purged and buried in order to make way for new Utopian societies. Hesse is persistent in the tactics he uses to carry out his message of moderation, yet both novels convey his lifelong message to the reader, namely: that individuality is paramount. Even once Hesse removes the political and economic stains of world war from cultural and academic life in Glass Bead Game, the individual must still wrestle with and win the struggle against a powerful collective. On the second level, both novels express Hesse's ambivalence to Modernist literary themes as single works. The novels combine elements that are modernist (fragmentation, uncertainty, documentary style) with themes that Hesse resurrects from earlier literary periods (unity, wholeness, order, communion with nature and omission of modern technology). Hesse's reasons for choosing future for both novels are not immediately clear and must be extrapoled from his own words, "The creation of a cleansed atmosphere was necessary to me. The worldly culture of that time will be the same as that of today, but there will be a spiritual/intellectual culture. Living and serving it will be worthwhile, that is the picture of a dream that I'd like to paint for myself." The Glass Bead Game is the longest and final novel, set in the twenty-fifth century. Most of it takes place in the pedagogical province of Kastalien, which has been created as a holy land where intellectuals are allowed to practice scholarship without having to worry about money, food or shelter. Once its inhabitants have progressed through the schools and have joined the Order Players, they are free to pursue any kind of intellectual activity they desire. A principal part of life in the province consists of playing the Glass Bead Game. In this activity information from different fields of knowledge is converted into music. Instead of combining both modernist and traditional literary techniques as he does in earlier works, Hesse chooses to use mostly modern techniques together with Hegel's philosophy of history when he constructed this novel. Hesse refers over the course of the novel to cultural figures from the past and to his own friends and colleagues. Knecht's frist name, Josef, refers to Thomas Mann, with whom Hesse "felt the had a special affinity" and who "was publishing his series of Joseph novels, concerning the outsider intellectual who becomes the protector of his people. The old music master is a "literary portrait of Goethe, drawn by Hesse in blind devotion. The protagonist Knecht in a letter to the Order that "envisage the possibility that, once again, the generals will dominate parliament, a belligerent ideology will arise, and education will be made to serve the ends of war ." The reader has the perception that Knecht is doing the right thing leaving the theoretical world in favor of the real world. Berman writes that " modernism rebels against the culture industry, not with better or higher prose but with multifarious strategies of destroying the iron cage. Its central concern is the emancipation of the reader from the system of deception perpetuated by established culture." It seems to me that the iron cage out of which Knecht breaks is that which the ideology has been built and reinforced, a mirror of Weber's conception of the cage as a loss of meaning and freedom. If the strict notion of the crushing of the individual in the name of "highest ideal" of anonymity and theoretical knowledge of the Game does not symbolically qualify as an iron cage, it should at least qualify as an example of a "system of deception perpetrated by established culture". Hesse's continued popularity is a testament to his applicability to all kinds of identity crises by virtue of his respect for the human. Ingo Cornilswrote about Hesse in 2009 that, "this humanism is what makes Hesse relevant for the twenty-first century. His holistic view of a human being as an evolving, struggling, ever-changing individual chimes with modern experience. He confronts us with uncomfortable truths about human nature but encourages us to face them to discover what lies beneath.
The Glass Bead Game is a humanist commitment to the vitality of everyday existence, a plea that learning and knowledge do not become ends in themselves but are harnessed to the furtherance of human society. Hesse describes the vision as encompassing wise men and scholars harmoniously building the valued and vaulted cathedral of mind. A cathedral, then something to be venerated, but a place to enterprise, functional, reflecting the currents of human endeavour. The novel is, it initially appears, the ultimate achievement of human culture. The novel takes place in a world that has passed beyond an age which war and conflict have predominated, and in which culture is trivialised and coarsened. The action is set a province of Castalia, where the academic pursuit of knowledge has become an aesthetic discipline, personified by the Glass Bead Game. This is a philosophical game in which glass beads are used to demonstrate the progress of the players during days a game take place. The goal is to find interconnectedness in the realms of arts and knowledge. The protagonist, Knecht stands at the centre of a series of binaries: castalia and the world, the game and realpolitik, secular reason and religious observance, pedagogy and pragmatic action, teachers and students, servitude and mastery, inwardness and outwardness, the active life and the contemplative life. Castalia and society tends to exaggerate these binaries, forcing them to stand in opposition to one to another. This is the way to dogma, Hesse warns. In the case of Castalia it will lead to its inevitable decline, divorced as it is from reality. Knecht, placed between these binary opposites, cognisant of the strengths and weaknesses of each, comes to understand how a path may be established which avoids their extremes and instead achieves a state of harmony.
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